While the “paperless”office may be reducing waste and saving trees, it has created its own set of unique challenges. Data centers, servers, local area networks and intranets are massive and complex, requiring specialized skills to build, install and maintain.

While things such as security from hackers and viruses, file storage and compression and the code behind the applications that make it all work is the realm of the software engineer, getting the actual hardware in place and working reliably in the first place is a field in which workers of the NECA-IBEW team excel.

Designing, building, installation and maintenance of the equipment that makes up a data center  is a mammoth undertaking, requiring many different skill sets and fields of knowledge. Likewise, the field of electrical engineering, design and construction is a vast one, with many specialties and sub-specialties. This is something that the NECA-IBEW team, through programs offered at training centers around the country, stays on top of. A journeyman with IBEW Local #46 in Washington’s Puget Sound metro region, says that “…going through the NJATC [National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee, the educational arm of the NECA-IBEW], there’s a lot of training specifically geared toward data centers.” This is no bad thing, given the way the world has come to come to depend on these centers, through which pass millions of communications, financial transactions, records and more every day.

There is another exciting and more immediate aspect to all of this, which affects virtually everyone who uses the World Wide Web while away from home with the use of laptops, smart phones and tablet computers. It crosses over into another field of electrical engineering, that of room and building lighting with the use of highly efficient LED technology.  It turns out that LEDs (light emitting diodes) are able to do double duty. They not only provide lighting at a minimal energy cost, but are able to transfer data between the World Wide Web and personal devices quickly and securely. This exciting new technology arguably traces its origins back hundreds of years to the use of signal fires, and was first demonstrated in a technological setting in the late 19^th Century. Its latest incarnation was first rolled out in 2010, and already has  been shown the ability to transmit data at the speed of 10,000 gigabytes per second.

When the American company LVX Systems needed the expertise and the ability to begin installation of  their visible light communication systems, they turned to the NECA-IBEW team. For the past few years, these union workers and contractors have been busy installing these systems across the U.S. and Canada, bringing a faster, more secure Internet to users in office buildings, libraries and universities and even cyber cafes.

IT is indeed about software design – but the underlying foundation consists of hardware – the nuts and bolts of these systems. That is something that the NECA-IBEW team knows all about, which has made them become a part of the future of communications.